ALI(E/A)NSI CONVERSATIONS #9
Ariel William Orah
For the 9th conversation in the ALI(E/A)NSI series, the perspective turns towards Ariel William Orah: artist, cultural practitioner, founder of sōydivision Berlin, and initiator and curator of ALI(E/A)NSI.
Rather than approaching the exhibition from outside, Ariel speaks from within a constellation that has accumulated slowly around Schöneweide and NOVILLA. Some relationships emerged through Moving Poets, others through sōydivision, Southeast Asian artistic networks, long friendships and collaborations. Others began much more casually: as neighbours and parents meeting at playgrounds, only gradually discovering one another as artists.
ALI(E/A)NSI did not begin by assembling artists around a finished curatorial thesis. It grew from recognising that these relationships were already there, although dispersed across different parts of everyday and artistic life. The exhibition became a way of making those partly invisible connections perceptible, while asking what happens when proximity develops into alignment, alliance and eventually affinity.
This also raises a more difficult question about authorship. What does it mean to create a constellation while simultaneously holding the power to invite, frame and publicly represent it? Ariel reflects on participation not as an automatically emancipatory gesture, but as an ongoing negotiation of resources, responsibility, disagreement, refusal and control.
The conversation then enters Ariel’s own artistic proposal for ALI(E/A)NSI, Südost Serenade. Through the figure of Hanomanno — migrant, witness, trickster, karaoke performer, time traveller and unreliable narrator — the work connects Schöneweide’s industrial history as Berlin’s Elektropolis with a wider research into technological progress, colonial infrastructure and extraction.
Moving between Southeast Asia and southeast Berlin, archival fragments and speculation, melancholy and humour, the conversation asks whether a constellation can ever become stable — or whether its significance lies precisely in remaining vulnerable to the people, histories and conflicts that enter it.
1. Curatorial origin
When did the participating artists stop appearing as separate neighbours and begin to appear as a constellation?
The artists did not suddenly appear to me as one constellation. They entered my life through different routes and at different moments. With Till, Milan and Lutz, the connection developed through Moving Poets and NOVILLA. Lutz was perhaps the earliest connection: someone who witnessed and participated in the transformation of Moving Poets and NOVILLA over many years.
Other connections emerged through sōydivision. Through this process, I also discovered that Asarela and Arel already had their own relationship to this area because they had studied at HTW Berlin nearby. With Sam, Sofia and Sebastian, the relationship began much more informally. We were neighbours and parents living in Schöneweide. We met at the playground with our children and gradually realised that we were all artists. From there came my desire to make the first connection between our practices.
Pisitakun entered through a long friendship and many years of collaboration. We shared a certain Southeast Asianness, as well as an engagement with sound, politics and collective artistic practice. Then, unexpectedly, he also became a studio resident at NOVILLA. Zoe came later through friendship and this wider network. Tatiana had previously participated in Soy&Synth and other sōydivision activities, and recently moved to Schöneweide herself. Through Tatiana, the constellation extended towards Florencia and their shared practice as Siestaria.
So there was no single moment when separate neighbours became a constellation. It happened gradually, when I began to notice connections between relationships that had previously existed in different parts of my life: Moving Poets, sōydivision, NOVILLA, Southeast Asian artistic networks, friendships, parenthood and everyday neighbourhood encounters. The constellation appeared when these lines began to overlap—and when I felt a desire to connect the people within them.
ALI(E/A)NSI became a way of making those existing but partly invisible relationships perceptible. The constellation was not invented by the exhibition, but the exhibition created a condition in which these different relationships could recognise and affect one another.
2. Practice
Your practice repeatedly creates formats—radio, communal meals, study spaces, karaoke, workshops and speculative institutions. When did building conditions for other people’s participation become part of the artwork itself?
Building conditions for participation became part of my practice when I began to understand art through social practice and socially engaged creation. In this understanding, the artwork does not exist separately from the conditions that allow people to enter it, contribute to it and negotiate what happens within it.
Radio, communal meals, study spaces, karaoke, workshops and speculative institutions are therefore not simply formats surrounding an artwork. They are artistic forms in themselves. Each produces a particular situation: who feels invited, who can speak, whose knowledge becomes audible, how long people remain together and what kinds of relationships can emerge.
This also developed from necessity. As a migrant artist, I could not always rely on existing cultural institutions to provide space for the people, practices and conversations that mattered to me. Creating formats became a way of building conditions that were otherwise missing. But these conditions cannot simply be designed once and then controlled. They must be negotiated with the people involved, and they can change through participation, disagreement, exhaustion, misunderstanding or refusal.
For me, this negotiation is where the artistic work lies. Participation alone does not make a project socially engaged or emancipatory. The question is how participation is made possible, how responsibility and resources are shared, and whether the people involved can genuinely influence what the work becomes. The artwork is therefore not only the encounter itself, but the ongoing construction, testing and renegotiation of the conditions under which that encounter can happen.
3. Power and authorship
How do you distinguish constellation-building from using other people to illustrate a curatorial concept? Where do you consciously give up control?
For me, constellation-building begins by recognising that every participant already has their own practice, history, relationships and reasons for being here. I do not invite artists simply to illustrate one of the five A’s or confirm a curatorial concept that has already been completed. The framework has to remain open enough to be questioned and transformed by what each artist brings.
I consciously give up control over how the artists interpret ALI(E/A)NSI, how they position their work within it and what kinds of relationships they form with one another. The curatorial conversations are important because they allow the exhibition’s language and narrative to develop through multiple voices. I may initiate a connection or propose a question, but I cannot predetermine what that encounter will produce.
At the same time, I do not want to pretend that authorship and power disappear. I initiated the exhibition, invited the artists, shaped the framework and still have considerable influence over how it is publicly communicated. There is an asymmetry, and simply calling the project collaborative does not remove it.
For me, giving up control therefore means first making this position visible. It also means allowing disagreement, accepting that the artists may understand the exhibition differently from me and creating space for them to change, reject or refuse what I propose. A constellation is not democratic simply because I declare it to be. It has to be continually negotiated through listening, credit, resources, space, decision-making and the possibility of saying no.
The difference between constellation-building and instrumentalisation lies in whether the people involved remain subjects within the process. Their practices should not become evidence for my curatorial argument. Instead, the argument itself must remain vulnerable to what their presence, work and disagreement reveal.
4. Südost Serenade
Hanomanno is a migrant, witness, trickster, time traveller and unreliable narrator. Why do you need this persona to approach Electropolis, colonial extraction and technological progress?
Südost Serenade was created as a site-responsive proposal for ALI(E/A)NSI. It brings my ongoing research project, Ecstatic Extraction, into the specific context of Schöneweide, where I live and work. The wider research examines the ecstatic promises of economic and technological progress alongside their extractive consequences: the labour, displacement, ecological damage and colonial relations that such promises often conceal.
Schöneweide was once promoted as Berlin’s Elektropolis, with AEG playing a central role in its industrial development. During my research, I found that early machinery used in Indonesian power plants was also produced by AEG. I cannot yet prove that this machinery came directly from the AEG factories in Schöneweide, but the possible connection opened a speculative passage between Southeast Asia and southeast Berlin. It allowed me to ask how technologies produced here may have travelled elsewhere through colonial infrastructures, and how the promise of electrification and modernisation depended upon extraction across distant geographies.
Hanomanno allows me to travel through these entangled histories without pretending to offer a complete or authoritative account. He is a migrant, witness, trickster, karaoke performer, time traveller and unreliable narrator. Inspired partly by Hanuman, the mystical monkey figure who appears in different cultural traditions across South and Southeast Asia, Hanomanno is not a direct representation of him. He is a post-migrant mutation who can move between Indonesia and Schöneweide, colonial history and contemporary Berlin, archival fragments and personal experience.
I need this persona because a stable autobiographical “I” feels insufficient for addressing histories that are fragmented, unevenly documented and shaped by institutional narratives of progress. Hanomanno gives me permission to speculate, exaggerate, mistranslate and move across time. His unreliability does not reject historical research; it makes visible the gaps and uncertainties within that research.
In Südost Serenade, these histories are translated into songs, humour, mistrust and melancholy inside a karaoke booth with 5.1 multichannel sound. Hanomanno can perform the seductive promise of technological progress while also disturbing it from within. The work asks what remains after the celebration of innovation has faded, and who or what has already been extracted to make that celebration possible.
5. Exhibition relation
What has one participating artist made you understand differently about your own project or about ALI(E/A)NSI as a whole?
Pisitakun’s work made me understand ALI(E/A)NSI differently. His artistic response to the two book burnings outside NOVILLA began with witnessing something very specific in our neighbourhood. He witnessed the first incident himself, which initially produced sadness. When books were burned again at the same place about a month later, that sadness turned into anger.
His work made me realise that a constellation is formed not only through shared artistic interests, friendship or proximity. It can also emerge through the responsibility of witnessing what happens in the place we share—and deciding how to respond.
As someone living in political exile because of his anti-monarchy activism in Thailand, Pisitakun brings a history that cannot simply be absorbed into a general narrative of migration. At the same time, his response connects this history to Schöneweide, to the continuing presence of right-wing ideology and to the question of who is considered entitled to inhabit and shape this neighbourhood.
This changed how I understood the exhibition’s movement through the five A’s: alien, alienation, alignment, alliance and affinity. I had initially imagined them partly as a process of transformation. Pisitakun’s work reminded me that this movement is neither smooth nor permanent. Alliance can begin in sadness or anger, while affinity does not make alienation disappear.
ALI(E/A)NSI is therefore less a journey towards harmony than a temporary structure for remaining present with one another—especially when the place we share becomes uncomfortable, threatening or contested.
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